Stifled Truth

Wyatt Mason

  • Old School by Tobias Wolff
    Bloomsbury, 195 pp, £12.99, February 2004, ISBN 0 7475 6948 7

‘I can’t imagine anything more quaint than a scatological retelling of some nursery tale, or a fiction about a writer writing the fiction you are reading,’ Tobias Wolff confessed in his 1993 introduction to the Picador Book of Contemporary American Stories. Writing fiction about a writer who is writing the fiction we are reading, Wolff would have us understand, is obscene. A writer reaching out from behind the curtain of the page to wave at the crowd undermines the enterprise: the rich illusion of reality is ruined. The writers whom Wolff esteems most – among them Kafka, Hemingway and Chekhov – share ‘the ability to breathe into their work distinct living presences beyond their own: imagined Others fashioned from words, who somehow take on flesh and blood and moral nature’.

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Vol. 26 No. 3 · 5 February 2004 » Wyatt Mason » Stifled Truth (print version)
Pages 19-20 | 3812 words